Updates on car culture ••• News and views related to Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile ••• Tips on car-free and car-lite living ••• Paths to freedom from auto and oil dependence

Sunday, March 28, 2010

To celebrate Earth Hour last night, we turned off the power to have a candlelit dinner. The flickering light from our six beeswax candles turned our ordinary little kitchen into a magical place for one hour (and a bit more, actually, because we liked it so well). Over food and by flame, we reflected on recent climate news.

This global news is all consistent with the unusually short winter we’ve had where I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s normal here to have significant snow on the ground for six to eight months of the year. Snow often begins falling in October or November, and hangs around until April or May.

This year, though, winter started late and left early. Earnest snow didn’t come until December 2nd, after an unusually warm November. We had some bone-chilling cold snaps in January, but still, folks noticed an absence of the usual ice buildup along the Lake Superior shoreline, especially by February. By the time March hit, we were getting lengthy thaws, and by mid-month organizers of winter sports events got worried. The annual cross-country ski Great Bear Chase squeaked through with careful course grooming and a shortening of routes; at least one ice-fishing tournament was canceled for lack of ice.

As I write this, there are still isolated spots where people can ski (or so I hear); and though it was short, this year’s ice-fishing season was reportedly good. Still, as of the spring equinox, what we actually had was – spring. That season usually doesn’t start up here until late April or early May. This year, though, winter has essentially ended after only four months – about half of what’s considered normal for the area.

One season doesn’t make a trend, and it’s true our previous winter was unusually harsh and cold. The string of winters before that, though, were also warm enough to worry ski enthusiasts and winter-tourism businesses. These warmer, shorter winters seem to have become more common now than the longer, colder seasons for which this place is known. It’s a compelling backdrop for Earth Hour and for contemplating the ramifications of living in a warming world.

So far, it’s not a disaster for someone like me, but I don’t live on an eroding coastal bluff, like so many Alaskan Inuits whose villages have to relocate, or on a low coastal plain, like the Bangladeshis who are becoming climate refugees as ocean advances over land. I don’t have most of my savings tied up in a low-lying coastal home in Louisiana or Mississippi or North Carolina or Florida. I don’t belong to a species whose food and habitat is dwindling as temperatures climb. Even for someone like me, though, it is a more unpredictable world, and I feel wary.

Another thing I contemplated by Earth Hour’s candlelight is this: whether all this local and global climate news demonstrates the reality of a warming planet is almost moot when one looks at the myriad good reasons to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Consider the huge destruction caused by extracting coal and oil from the ground; the volume of toxics their transport and use adds to air and water; the social and political conflicts they engender worldwide. In contrast, less use of fossil fuels gives us magical candlelit dinners, the health and fresh air of a walk or bike ride, the companionship and community of sharing rides with neighbors.

Wrapped up in proposed solutions to climate change is a beautiful lifestyle, a richer lifestyle, one that recognizes we don’t need growth for prosperity, one where the whole year can consist of a series of Earth Hours. It’s the kind of lifestyle I discovered when I found that using less fossil fuel to get around made my life better, not worse, and that ultimately led me to write Divorce Your Car! It’s the gift we find hidden in more often turning off the power, a gift that can help us as we help others and make many things a little more magical.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

I’m getting ready to turn off my lights and grid power at 8:30 p.m. tonight, along with millions of others around the globe taking part in Earth Hour 2010. I love the visual nature of Earth Hour, the imagery of this time-zone by time-zone lights-out around the planet, this global wave of shadow and light. If enough of us turn enough things off, we can create a downward blip in power use that will show decision-makers we’re ready to conserve on a big scale. We’re taking personal steps to cut fossil fuel consumption and we want our reps take political steps, too.

Another cool thing going on this weekend is a Pedal-Powered Blogathon, a fundraiser for the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri. The blogathon will use a pedal-powered laptop, hooked up to a "Pedal-A-Watt" bicycle-powered generator. I just found out about this a few hours ago, and love the whole concept.

If you, too, like the idea of pedal-powered appliances, check out a book called The Human-Powered Home by Tamara Dean. It’s put out by New Society Publishers, also the publisher of Divorce Your Car! and many other terrific sustainability books. Real books, too – the kind you can read tonight as you’re celebrating Earth Hour, by candlelight or maybe even by the light of the nearly-full moon.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Every so often, it seems, we need a literary reminder of the issues troubling our automotive love affair, and there emerges a full-blown critique of car culture. I base this judgment on the periodic release, over the last few decades, of several books fitting this description.

Here are a few of late-20th century books that I’d put in the category of car culture critique (this is not by any means comprehensive, so please feel free to comment with your own favorite titles):

The Highway and the City by Lewis Mumford, 1963The Insolent Chariots by John Keats, 1964Road to Ruin by A.Q. Mowbray, 1969Autokind vs. Mankind by Kenneth Schneider, 1971Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, 1985The End of the Road by Wolfgang Zuckermann, 1991For Love of the Automobile by Wolfgang Sachs, 1992The Elephant in the Bedroom by Stanley Hart and Alvin Spivak, 1993Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay, 1997

As of the 21st century, we have my own contribution to the literature, Divorce Your Car! which came out in May of 2000. And now we have another fine book, Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives, by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez. I’ve been reading this book lately, and I find its stories and analysis very insightful.

I’m just about to finish Carjacked as I prepare to host a chat with the authors – that’s coming up tomorrow 3/20 from 5 to 7 p.m. Eastern time in the Book Salon of the Firedoglake.com website. We’ll be talking about Carjacked, and about questions like the one I raised in my title-composed-of-titles for this blog post. Please join us!